The Heritage Audience Survey: Methodology and Issues

Abstract

This chapter investigates contemporary audiences for period films, specifically, the Heritage Audience Survey participants, in the United Kingdom from a range of perspectives. It describes the development, design, methodological rationale and practicalities (and limitations) of the Heritage Audience Survey itself. In view of the centrality of class ideologies and matters of class culture, the wider components of identity and the formation of middle-brow ‘good taste’ to the heritage-film debate and its assumptions about film audiences, a defining feature of this book is that it is as interested in the ‘intertextual organisation’ of the audience members it studies as it is in their readings and uses of heritage films. The survey is simultaneously a study of respondents' current and recent film viewing habits, film tastes and attitudes in the late 1990s, but one which is able to situate these historically and contextually in relation to the cinematic and cultural-political context of the 1980s heritage debate, the late 1990s ‘present’ of the survey, and points in between.